There are problems in America with freedoms of expression, and privacy. Yes, that is a completely accurate statement to make.

Yes, there are problems with the Government attempting to spy on it's citizens.

However, anyone who would compare us, in an honest and non-ironic fashion, to a country like Iran, or Nazi Germany, or Maoist China/Stalinist Russia, needs a good, hard cockpunch from someone who actually lived through those regiemes and managed to escape them.

stryed:You've clearly missed all the latest talk about having to privatize every inch of the planet in order to protect it. One day there won't be an "outside of the sphere of the human system". At present, we are recognizing that we are part of the biosphere, but in the future, the biosphere will become part of the human sphere.Imagine drones silently hovering above your hiking trail in order to call for aid if an accident occurs, or to debit your account if you happen to leave your water bottle behind or cause unnecessary sound pollution.

No, you've missed my point. Humans don't OWN anything. Nature holds trumps. We have fancy tech, yes, but we have to be around to make and maintain it. Humans, as a species, will one day be extinct just as mammoths and trilobites bit the dust.

If the transhumanists are right and we all become machines, then you will have a point (at that point, I would say we are no longer human). Until then, we're not that different from ants or wolves or fish. We change the environment on a larger scale, but ultimately we still need to eat, shiat, etc. The most relevant part you're missing is that we depend on the environment we are destroying to survive, and depend on energy from finite fossil fuels to fuel our technogadgets. Things change, and human organizations, patterns, ways of life wash away with the tide. Our current "survelliance everywhere" trend is just another trend, one that has been done before on a less techy scale (internal passports in places like Edo Japan and Soviet Russia, informants and Stasi in East Germany, etc.).

The human sphere can ONLY exist within the sphere of nature, because we are animals that must eat living things and breed to survive. Our lifetimes our finite and all the works of man are a blink in time.

hardinparamedic:There are problems in America with freedoms of expression, and privacy. Yes, that is a completely accurate statement to make.

Yes, there are problems with the Government attempting to spy on it's citizens.

However, anyone who would compare us, in an honest and non-ironic fashion, to a country like Iran, or Nazi Germany, or Maoist China/Stalinist Russia, needs a good, hard cockpunch from someone who actually lived through those regiemes and managed to escape them.

From someone who lived under one of those regimes:

What struck me after living in the US for a while, was the similarity, at a very fundamental level, between the US and Soviet systems: while the means by which they attain their objectives differ, the objectives themselves are, for all practical purposes, the same: control and exploitation of the public. Both systems indoctrinate with propaganda from childhood. But because the Soviet system had coercion at its disposal, the propaganda did not need to be convincing: if you stepped out of line, the government came hard after you. That's why propaganda could be blatant and absurd, and the public was fully aware of it and did not believe it, only pretended to. That is also one reason why the Soviet system collapsed.

The US system cannot use coercion (well, not at the Soviet level, at any rate, but the way things are going, give it time), so it must rely solely on propaganda, which must be believed. This means it's got to be very subtle and psychologically simple and attractive, rather than blatant and absurd, to be at once unobtrusive and effective. It's no coincidence that the mother of marketing and advertising originates here. If you step out of line, the government does not need to come after you: business, the media, and even the public itself will. They cannot jail, torture, or disappear you (the system is testing the waters, though), but they will try to marginalize you, and make it very difficult to function professionally and socially. And at least insofar as members of the public are concerned, they are enforcers without realizing it. Quite elegant.Otherwise put, under Soviet "communism", everybody must believe without questioning in the party, which almost nobody did; under US "capitalism", everybody must believe without questioning in "the market", which almost everybody does (I use quotes, because neither system is the true thing, as they pretend).--Fabian Pascal.

Subby's wrong: I found nothing to refute in the article. Just because a regime isn't shooting and labor camping people left and right doesn't mean people are free. How about being able to protest without being arrested? How about laws in ordinary peoples' favor instead of against?

Agent Smiths Laugh:My primary point being that if you think for one minute that the government is actually on your side, you're being a fool.

On the flip side, if you think for one minute that someone who is against the government is on your side, you're in for a surprise.

Then again, you seem to think that anyone who isn't immediately suspicious of everything the government does must live under the delusion that the government is actually on his "side" at all times. You can be skeptical about an action's implied interest without dismissing the legitimacy of it outright. Absolutism is f*cking this country up, just like it does with every other culture that allows that to happen.

I'd take the author more seriously if his tinfoil hat weren't on so tight.

In many respects American culture, seen from the inside, is more diverse, tolerant and interesting than ever before. Yet the American nation-state seems to be in terminal decline.

Really, now?

It is politically ungovernable, bitterly divided by class, caste, region and ideology.

Compared to say, the US in the 1960s? Or the 1860s, for that matter?

The executive branch and the "military-industrial complex" have expanded exponentially since Eisenhower's day, accumulating more and more power where it can't be seen. Read carefully through the recent news about the NSA revelations and you can see a few tendrils of this stuff: We know more than we did two weeks ago, but there are still entire government agencies whose names and missions are unknown, and programs so secret that Congress votes to fund them without knowing what they do.

Does anyone think Congressmen of the opposition party are going to be willfully ignorant of "secret" evil plots by the party in power?

On the international stage, America plays a grotesque supervillain role, blundering from nation to nation like Robocop in an endless war that has yielded only hatred and mockery.

Nazi Germany, Stalin's Russia, hell Napoleon's France were "grotesque supervillains". I don't see a grand alliance of nations sacrificing blood and treasure to bring the "US monster" to heel, do you?

Radical Islam has always been our enemy, except when our enemy has always been Communism.

buzzcut73:Senseless_drivel: leevis: sheep snorter: 1953: The CIA farks over Iran by overthrowing the legitimate rulers and putting in a mildly religious government.

circa 1980: the traitor Ronald Reagan makes it worse with putting in a by secretly negotiating with the extra extremist religious government as a candidate and using hostages as a way to be called victorious as the new President.

Senseless_drivel:leevis: sheep snorter: 1953: The CIA farks over Iran by overthrowing the legitimate rulers and putting in a mildly religious government.

circa 1980: the traitor Ronald Reagan makes it worse with putting in a by secretly negotiating with the extra extremist religious government as a candidate and using hostages as a way to be called victorious as the new President.

leevis:sheep snorter: 1953: The CIA farks over Iran by overthrowing the legitimate rulers and putting in a mildly religious government.

circa 1980: the traitor Ronald Reagan makes it worse with putting in a by secretly negotiating with the extra extremist religious government as a candidate and using hostages as a way to be called victorious as the new President.

hardinparamedic:There are problems in America with freedoms of expression, and privacy. Yes, that is a completely accurate statement to make.

Yes, there are problems with the Government attempting to spy on it's citizens.

However, anyone who would compare us, in an honest and non-ironic fashion, to a country like Iran, or Nazi Germany, or Maoist China/Stalinist Russia, needs a good, hard cockpunch from someone who actually lived through those regiemes and managed to escape them.